Today,
I'm bringing you the sequel to my Sony Picture Profile
comparison video, from early 2019, but this one
is going to be bigger, better, more practically useful
and utilizing the a7S III. Let's get undone. [offbeat music] ♪ Gerald Undone ♪ ♪ He's crazy ♪ What's happening, everybody?
I'm Gerald Undone and now this...
is podracing. Okay, first off,
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of Storyblocks assets. Again, link in
the description below. Okay, so let's start
this video by comparing the synthetic
measurements of dynamic range and then move into some
more practical comparisons, and then we'll cover noise,
colour accuracy, exposure and
post-processing along the way. For those synthetic
measurements, I used Imatest to measure the dynamic range
and signal noise ratio of most of the gammas
in the a7S III. This is made possible
thanks to DSC Labs who provided the Xyla 21, a chart that gives 20
calibrated stops of light. I also tested
the colour accuracy using DSC Labs'
chroma charts. They make the best charts in
the business, hands down. All right, let's go
through the results. Okay,
for each one of these here, I've got three images
to show you. I've got the Imatest results, I've got the waveform and then I've got
the actual recorded images. This is what the Xyla chart
looks like when you record it, then this is what the waveform
looks like in Resolve, and then when we process
the Xyla chart image this is
what we get from Imatest. Now, before we go
into this too deeply, because CineD just posted
their a7S III deep dive video and just in case
some of you have seen both and you want to know
why my dynamic range results seem different
in Imatest than theirs, I've tried to follow the same
protocol to make it easy for you to look at both results for different cameras
to mix and match. Unfortunately,
they're still using an older version of Imatest, which uses quality-based
dynamic range analysis and I'm using a new version which uses a slope-based
dynamic range. Now, they're not doing
anything wrong. They're actually doing the right thing because
they're keeping it consistent against all of their old
results, which is really the only way to do it
if you want to benchmark. You need to keep
the same tests going. For me, because I got
into it later on, you can't do quality-based
anymore on the newer version, so all of my results
for all the cameras I've tested in my videos have been
slope-based, so you can still use all of my
results within themselves, but if you're
comparing them to CineD, there might be about
half a stop difference, with my results being maybe
half a stop more optimistic. You can probably use that,
I guess, for comparison's sake, if you want
to compare to CineD with other cameras
they've covered. However, don't worry
too much about this. These numbers are just
synthetic. They're exactly that, which means they're good
for a benchmark, so you can see which profile
is better than another profile, or which camera is better
than another camera, but you shouldn't
take this number to mean anything outside of that.
So, here for instance, under "Slope-based DR",
we can see a score of 12.8. That's, I guess, like,
12.8 stops is what it was able to stop in Cine1.
Now, at the top, you can always see the profile,
so this is "Cine1 - ISO 64". That's the base ISO. All these
are gonna be at their base ISO. So, if you want to know
what the base ISO is for each gamma, it's going to be
written right beside it there. But, if we look at
the medium score, the one that says
"0.5 (Medium)", this will give us
a signal-to-noise ratio analysis of two.
This is considered to be... pretty good. That would be
good, clean, usable stops. So, we got a 12 there.
So, we definitely lose some from total scene to clean stops.
So, those are the two that I'm going
to be talking about. Those two numbers as we go
through here. Another way that we can
look at this is if you go to
the actual Xyla 21 chart and you start counting stops.
You can see that after, you know, around 12 stops, it starts to fade
into oblivion in the black. It's also heavily
populated with noise. And, if we look at
this thing here, we can also count stops.
So, say that we counted from the top here.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
nine, ten, eleven, twelve. This is that 12th stop, which is really close
to the noise floor. So, that's this sort of
white bar that runs across here. Anything that's in and around
or under this white bar is just lost to noise.
It's not going to be useful. Now, if we move on
to the next one here, you'll see that it's also Cine1,
but this time it says "109%". And I didn't do this
for every profile, but I did it for two just to
give you an example of this. Each one of these profiles,
well some of them, have the ability
to go above 100%. It's called "super whites"
and it's when you exceed the 100% clipping point
for regular broadcast. Those don't really get counted
if you look at the waveform. You see how this is clipping
and it's beyond? So, that's going to affect
your dynamic range reading with this Imatest result.
So, I did it twice. I did one, which is,
as we can see here, this is if
I didn't do anything and I just let
the super whites clip, and then for the earlier one, I brought the super whites
back down and kept them within range and then ran
an analysis that way. And the difference
that you'll see is that you gain about a stop. So, regular Cine1,
right out of the camera is going to get us 11.1, if you look at
the medium score here. That is 11.1 usable stops, right out of the camera without
doing any adjustments in post. But, if we recover
our super whites, we can get that up to 12 stops. So, it's about
a stop extra above 100% that a lot of
these profiles to have. And, we're going
to talk a lot about this when it comes to what makes
a profile easy to use or not because if you want
maximum dynamic range, you can't just use
it right into camera because you're going to
lose about a stop because of those super whites. So,
the next one that we have here is "Cine2".
It also has 12 stops. Now, this one
didn't have to be recovered because there are
no super whites. It clips at 100%
and that's gonna be probably our easiest profile. Again,
we'll talk about that later on. If you want to see these charts,
I'll leave them up so you can pause and
look at them if you want. I'll move slowly.
Those are the Cine2 ones. Then, we've got "Cine3",
which got 12.1, and this is what it looks like
here. And here. And then "Cine4",
which also got 12.1. And here. And here. Now, for all of those Cines,
I recovered the super whites. If you recover the super
whites, they all get around 12 stops. If you don't
and you let them clip, then you lose about a stop
on Cine1, Cine3 and Cine4. Cine2 does not have
super whites. Now, let's move on to this one.
This is "HLG". Now, this is HLG regular and ISO 100 is its base ISO,
and we have 11.8 stops. This one also doesn't have
super whites. It clips at 100% or like 99%. And,
that's what it looks like, and that's what
it looks like there. "HLG1".
Now, HLG1 is different. It clips a lot lower
and the whole point of this one
was that they claim that it gives you noise reduction,
and we're going to talk about that when we talk about noise.
Basically, the whole thing is shifted down, so your
clipping point is a lot earlier. I think it's like 85%
or something like that, but the whole image
will look darker. Now, if we look here, you can see
where it's clipping now. This is ETTRed
all the way up here. HLG2, on the other hand,
does half of that. It's kind of like a halfway
in between regular HLG, well, HLG3 and HLG1. HLG3 is very similar to HLG, a little bit different though. So, HLG2 is halfway in between. Some of the noise
reduction of HLG1, but not all of it
and it doesn't have as low of a clipping point.
If you look it's up here, which I think is,
like, 95%, or maybe 93%. I'll have to look these up.
By the way, I get asked about that all
the time. Let's just do it right here on the fly.
So, if ever you want to know about these Sony
picture profiles and you want the answers real quick,
maybe you're out and about, the best thing
to search for is type in: "Sony help guide basic
contrast". If you type that in,
I didn't even spell contrast right,
but it'll give you the result and you can see here:
Movie, Still, all the Cines, the S-Log2 and 3,
and the HLG and it'll tell you
everything you need to know. Like, maximum video output
level for HLG1 is 87%. For HLG2, it's 95%. If you want to know for Cine1,
if it exceeds the 100%, it says so right there.
109%, but Cine2, 100%. So, setting basic contrast, Sony help guide and you'll be
able to pull that up whenever you need it.
So, that's your answer to where does HLG2 clip?
It's 95%. So, things are pushed down
a little bit, so the noise floor is going
to be buried a little bit, but not as much as HLG1. Oh, and the dynamic
range score from Imatest for HLG2 was 12.2 and it was 12.2 for HLG1 and 11.8 for HLG, and a lot of that has
to do with that noise. Imatest can kind of
be fooled a little bit if you do extra noise reduction. You can kind of beat it
a little bit, which is what
those HLGs are doing. HLG3 comes in at 12.3, which, this is
a correction I should make on my original
Sony a7S III video. I said that HLG3 got 13 stops. I'm not sure if there was
something wrong with that test. I didn't have a lot of time
with the pre-production camera, or maybe something's changed
since the pre-production. It's probably
just an error on my part, but I've run all of these
like three times now and I'm getting 12.2, 12.3
with HLG3 pretty much every time.
But, if we compare HLG3 on the waveform here to HLG0,
if you want to call it that, you do see there's
a difference in the shadows. You see how these
are getting lifted up? And then these are
pushed down more? That's a little bit of that
HLG noise reduction. It still exists in HLG3, but it doesn't really exist
in the base HLG. One thing I should touch on
though before moving forward with the rest of
the profiles is raw. I've been asked a lot on social what the dynamic range
of raw is. That's not really how it works. Raw doesn't have
a different dynamic range. Raw just refers to the data
coming off the sensor in its raw, pure form. You're still going
to have to sculpt that raw data into a picture by giving it
a picture profile, if you will. That means you're gonna
have to assign a colour gamut and a gamma to it.
And, when you do that, you're going to have
to choose one of these, or maybe they restrict you
to just using S-Log3, let's say, in which case,
the result should be very similar to
just the results of S-Log3. It's not a different picture
profile, if that makes sense. It's the same. You still have
to choose one of these gammas. Let's move on to the
next one here. What do we got? So, "PP Off". Now, you'll see in
parentheses, it says, "Movie". Something you should know
about the Sony cameras is that the Movie gamma
is the same gamma that you get when you turn picture profile
off when shooting video. If you're shooting photos,
PP Off is the same as Still gamma.
The dynamic range of PP Off, I have 11.9 stops and the base ISO is ISO 80. This
is another one where I did the recovering of
the super whites because yes, even Movie gamma
or PP Off exceeds 100%. It can go up to 109%. So, we got 11.9 stops.
Now, let's jump ahead to-- that's what it looks like there
with the super whites recovered. Up top there. And now let's jump to
PP Off(Movie) at 109%. Without the
super whites recovered, we drop down to 10.9 stops. So, this is the lowest you're
going to get on this camera, is 10.9, which probably
would be, like, 10.5 for CineD's
version of testing it, and similar to what you would
get with a Sony a7S III, but if you recover
the super whites, you do get an extra stop there. And you can see
on the waveform, this is what the super whites look like
when they're not recovered. There's a full stop above 100%
that we're not seeing anymore. Now, we've got "S-Log2". I got 12.7 stops here and this is what it looks like
on the waveform. And, this is what
the shot looks like there. And, "S-Log3",
13 stops. So, S-Log2, better than
all the other profiles, but not quite as good as S-Log3, which comes in at 13.
I already shared these numbers on my review.
S-Log3 has the best score at 13 stops, and here's
what the waveform looks like. What I like about S-Log3
is that each one of the stops has a pretty even distribution.
It almost looks like a perfect staircase,
but I think that that's it for the Xyla 21 information. So... if you just want to know
the synthetic dynamic range, it's S-Log3 is best. Picture profile off,
Movie gamma with uncorrected super whites is the worst, and then most of
the Cine gammas and HLGs are in between
at about 12 stops. Okay, now let's take
a look at those results, but how they would look
in a dynamic scene. This is my favourite way to
test dynamic range practically. Often, you'll see tests
where a shot is taken twice at two different exposures,
and they'll measure how well those shots can be normalized.
This can be a useful indicator of how recoverable
a camera's image is, but it's not dynamic range
by definition. Dynamic range is
a ratio between the values that can occur simultaneously.
So, for that, we need to set up a scene
that best demonstrates this. OK, so, this is the scene here.
You can see that I'm in the shadow and I'm
holding a colour checker so that we can use that for reference,
including middle grey. And then, outside,
we have a bright sky. And the exposure is to make
sure that the sky is protected. So, that's why I'm so dark
because we expose for the sky and not for me. All the
super whites are protected and brought back down
in each one of these shots. Which is why, in PP Off,
I go pretty much into black in order to protect
the highlights fully. So, this would give us
the maximum dynamic range for each one of these profiles
and we're also shooting at base ISO,
so we're gonna get the lowest ISO induced noise
for each one as well. And all these are ETTRed, we're
gonna talk about that a lot, which means that they're exposed
all the way to the right, meaning that we've exposed
to the brightest that we can on the histogram
without letting the things that we don't
want to clip, clip. In this case, that's the sky. So, the sky's exposed
all the way to the right. Now, when doing this,
each one of them has their own clipping point, which
I've already talked about, but you need to make sure
that you ETTR if you're going for best noise performance
with aperture. You open up your aperture
to actually let more light in, not boost the ISO.
The only exception here is that if increasing the ISO
would allow you to switch to
the second native ISO of a dual-gain circuit,
then you would actually see benefit from increasing
the ISO to ETTR. But, typically, if you're
staying within a single circuit, increasing the ISO
will also kind of increase the noise in the shot
in sort of an evenly scaling way so you're not
really getting any benefit. Typically,
by ETTRing with ISO, you want to let
more light into the sensor, which is what we did here. All
of these have the same base ISO, but they're exposed
with aperture. Something interesting
that you'll notice is that if
the aperture is the same, so in this case, let's say
they were, I don't know, f/11, okay? I don't
remember what they were. All of the ISOs
for each picture profile are relative to each other. So, f/11 on PP Off at ISO 80 will be exposed
correctly to the right the same way that
ISO 640 f/11 for S-Log 3 will be exposed correctly
to the right. ISO 80
and ISO 80 aren't the same, but they each have
their own base ISO and they each scale at the same rate.
So, if you wanted to move up one stop on PP Off,
you'd go to 160, where on S-Log3,
you'd go to 1250. That would be another stop up. And then, 160 over here,
1250 over here, again would be the same and they
would achieve the same exposure. I think this is what
some of the confusion comes from when
people compare, say, ISO 3200 in one profile
versus another. Well, ISO 3200 in S-Log
is not the same as ISO 3200 in Cine
or in Movie gamma, so they have to be compensated
for by moving up from the base the same amount of stops.
Hopefully, that makes sense. Actually, while we're talking
about clipping points and clipping to the right,
I want to show you something on the Sony camera.
Now, I'm gonna screen record what I'm seeing
on the screen with the Atmos, but there is a limitation here.
The Zebras from the Sony don't get outputted
to the Ninja, so I can't actually show you
the Zebras being on or off, but hopefully this will still be
a useful demonstration. So, if we point the camera at a
really bright source like this, and then we bring up
our Zebra menu, you see how
if we go down to C2 here, we have the option to
set a lower limit? If you have a source
that's definitely clipping, without a doubt,
like jack your ISO up to 10,000 if you want.
Make sure that it's clipping. As you increase
the lower limit percentage, there will be a point
where the Zebras disappear. At that point,
that's your clipping point. The Zebras stop working
when you've exceeded your clipping point.
So, for S-Log3, like I said, you're not gonna be able to see
it, but it would be like this. Say we start at 89, you would
have Zebras on this light, and it'd still have them,
have them, have them, and then when you hit 95+,
they would disappear. So, then you know you have
to go back down to 94+ and that's where you should set
your maximum point. Like, never let
anything exceed 94. If you wanted to add
some safety, you could go down a couple more percentage
points from there as well. And this will work for every
profile, but when you switch to Cine1, for instance,
you'll be able to go all the way up to 109+,
which is the top, and you'll still have Zebras
because that's the maximum that it's allotted for. But, now you know
how they're all exposed. They're all at
their own clipping point. I'm just gonna click through
and you can see the profile and the ISO,
the base ISO, and you can see how much
of me sort of appears out of the shadows.
So, at PP Off, I'm the farthest down in the shadow. Let
me put the waveform on too. And then, this is Cine1.
I come back a little bit. Cine2. It's sort of
somewhere in between. Cine3 is about
the same as Cine2, but the highlights change. You can see. I'm not gonna
give a commentary on each one, but there are a couple things
that are important here. When we go to S-Log2,
now all of a sudden, we see in the
shadows a lot more. And, when we go to S-Log3,
it's even more still. So, this is where the actual
advantage of S-Log3 comes in. Is that you can preserve
the highlights and still see way more into the shadows
than with the other profiles. And this often causes
a misconception in having people think that
there's more noise in S-Log3 than there is
in Movie gamma or something like that.
A gamma doesn't create noise. There's not more noise
in one gamma than another. What changes is the position
of elements in the frame, the luminance values
of those things in the frame relative to the noise floor. So, if you have
something like PP Off that is very black,
that's because it pushed the noise floor
all the way down. And, you can do this
kind of in post if you just go like this
and bring me down in the shadows.
Now, oh look, there's no noise in S-Log3 anymore.
There is HLG. You can see it's definitely darker than,
HLG1 is even darker. This is important because
HLG1 claims that it hides more noise, and has
a lower clipping point. And, you can definitely
see, the sky got darker and I am hidden
more in the shadows now. HLG2 should be a
little less so of that. And then HLG3,
less so as well. Now, when we correct
all of these images to put middle grey
at the same point. This is going to be that
shadow recovery thing that I talked about,
but in this case, these aren't two separate shots.
This is the exact same shot that happened at the same time.
All I've done is now boosted to bring
middle grey to the same point. And I did that because
I wanted to have a uniform exposure here. So, for PP Off,
this middle grey chip is now at the same level,
I put it around 42-43%, the best I could
in the waveform, and I did that for
every single profile. Now, this sky is gone.
We're not gonna be able to expose somebody in shadow
for perfect middle grey and keep the sky.
That's just, I don't know any camera
that can do that. But, what we should look at
is probably the exposure on my knuckles
and this part on the curtain that's kind of blown out.
But, if we switch to Cine1, you can see a lot more
of the curtain came back. So, it is doing better
to retain those highlights when we bring up
the middle grey. Cine2 looks pretty similar. Cine3,
pretty similar as well. And Cine4. Cine4 doesn't do
quite as well in the highlights, but it has a bit more contrast,
and that's kind of what Cine4 does. It has a
more severe S-curve than some of the other Cine profiles,
which is why some people like using it for straight
into camera because it already has a bit
of contrast to it. Now, let's jump over to S-Log2.
Now, you can see that S-Log2 doesn't seem like it
changed that much in the shadows and that's because
the shadows were already raised in S-Log2,
which means we didn't have to boost it as much, which means we
actually keep a lot more information. Not only is the curtain
not clipping at all. Jump back to Cine4.
S-Log2. But, the bar here on the window is, actually
has detail in it and you can see a little bit of tree in the sky, which you couldn't really see
before. And if we go to S-Log3, it's even better still,
and this should be a pretty convincing example
of why S-Log3 is the best on this camera.
The curtain is perfect. My skin is perfect. The window column
is almost completely there and we've started
adding extra trees into the background now.
So, S-Log3, S-Log2, Cine3, S-Log3. You can see
it's significantly different, and that's one example
of how dynamic range can be seen actively
in a dynamic scene with two things
going on at once. Now, if we actually look
at the noise here, let's play this back a little
bit. The S-Log3 so we can see how much noise we have.
I know this is YouTube, so it might be difficult to see,
so let me punch right in here to a high percentage
and we'll look at this area of the skin tone and the colour
checker. Very noisy, right? Definitely. But, let's
go back to PP Off, which had some of the best noise
originally, and you can see that it's very noisy as well, but
it might actually look worse. And if we look at my skin,
there is a lot going on here that doesn't look good
versus S-Log3, which was this one,
I think. So, the noise is still there.
That's because the noise was always there.
It didn't change. All it changed was
where the image lived relative to the noise floor,
which is why exposure is the most important thing
when it comes to noise. If you underexpose,
you're putting your image into that noise floor.
The gamma doesn't matter. How you work with
the gamma is what matters. HLG, HLG1. Again,
look how much darker, you can see HLG1 now. You can
really see how those blacks are pushed down.
Middle grey is the same now, but the blacks
are really pushed down. HLG2,
a little bit less so. And then HLG3, a little
bit less so, but now you can see the difference in HLG3 and HLG. When you recover
middle grey, HLG, the whole scene
kind of comes up a little bit, where HLG3,
the darker blacks that are "noise reduced" a little bit
still stay down there and the middle grey
comes up differently. Oh, and while we're talking
about this whole shadow stuff, just a quick note
on the Dynamic Range Optimizer. I get asked
about this a lot too. The--first of all, don't use it.
I know that you may have experience where you used it
and you liked the results or whatever. The
Dynamic Range Optimizer is just image processing, which
means that if you turn it on and you see a difference,
that same difference could be achieved in post. If you
raise the shadows in camera with the DRO, and you
raise them post, the noise is going to go up in both.
They're going to look the same. And in many cases,
the Dynamic Range Optimizer won't even do anything
because it only works if your image was not exposed
correctly or if it thinks there's room for improvement,
which means you should probably just expose your image better
and use the correct gamma for what you're shooting.
Don't rely on the Dynamic Range Optimizer. So,
if we know that you can beat the noise by getting it
above the noise floor, the question becomes, "How much do
you have to overexpose S-Log3 to beat the noise floor? Or at
least get noise that's similar to what you would get
for Movie gamma." And I keep using Movie gamma
because it has the least noise
straight out of camera. So, if we're trying to
get to that result, how much do we have to overexpose S-Log3?
The answer I found is about 1.66 stops. And,
I'll be able to demonstrate this with a few images
that I have here. So, this first shot here,
you can see that it's S-Log3,
41% middle grey, ISO 640 base. What that means is that I
exposed this middle grey bar, where the text is,
to 41% in camera. And, remember when I showed you,
on the Zebras, how if you go to C1,
you can set it to-- I'll just show you again.
So, this is how you would expose for middle grey
the most accurate way. Get yourself one of these.
This is just a grey card. It's an 18% grey card.
Look for that. You can get it on Amazon.
Probably $5 or $10 for like three of them
or something. Get a size that works for you.
One that you can keep with you that won't be an issue.
This, when you look up a profile that says, "S-Log3
should be-- at 18% reflectance it should be set to 41%
or whatever." They want this to read 41%. So, you put this
in your frame. Put this under the lighting that
you're trying to expose for. If it's your talent,
put it here like this. Put it in the frame and
then point your camera at it, and then go down to those
Zebra settings, and I like to use C1,
Standard Range. And then you change
this number to be whatever you're aiming for.
So, in this case, 41%, and then set
the plus or minus, which can
be all the way up to ten, but then set it down to
plus or minus one, so that way you know you're going
to get very close to 41%. Now again, I'm not recording
Zebras in the camera here, but let's say that I was.
Then, we would come in and adjust our exposure. Say we're
going to get there with ISO. We would increase the ISO
or decrease the ISO until this card was filled mostly
with Zebras, and that'll let you know that card is at 41%,
or at least the section that's covered in Zebras is at 41%.
Then, when you have that, you know you're good to go.
So, anytime you see me say that I expose middle grey
to whatever percentage, I used a grey card and Zebras
and I set it to a percentage and then I changed my exposure
until the Zebras appeared on the grey card. This is
the cheapest thing you can get to get better exposure. And
then if you want to use things like LUTs and transforms,
if you dial that in, those LUTs and transforms
should work a lot easier, which is why Log is
actually the easiest gamma to use, but we'll talk about
that at the end. Okay,
let me stop recording this. All right, so back to what
I was talking about with overexposing by 1.66 stops.
What that means is that middle grey exposure of
41% is going to be 1.66 stops higher than 41%. It doesn't
mean that your camera meter says +1.7. It can,
if the meter does a good job, but often what's going on
in your scene, you can't really
trust that meter and the meter works
differently depending on the gamma that you chose. So, I don't like it so much.
What I'd rather do is just increase
that Zebra number. So, rather than 41%,
if we increase it by 1.66 stops, you'll probably end
up somewhere around 55%. So, you can set your Zebra
to 55% and then expose middle grey for that 55%
and you'll naturally be one and a half to two stops
brighter than you would've been if it was set to 41%. So, in this image here,
middle grey is exposed to 41%, which is exactly what
S-Log3 wants if you use any by the books transforms or LUTs.
And, you can see if you look at my nodes here,
Color Space Transform, if you don't use Resolve,
that's okay. First of all, use Resolve. It's so
much better for colour work, but if you don't, you can
do all of this with LUTCalc. or using manufacturer LUTs. I have a whole
'nother video on doing that. I'll give you a little bit of
tips at the end of this video, but you should definitely
watch the other video. It's like an hour long
and it explains everything. But, over here, you can see
we're converting S-Gamut3.Cine, which was the colour gamut
that we used, and S-Log3,
we're converting to Rec. 709. It says "Use timeline".
That's because my timeline is Rec. 709,
so it converts it to that. And, if you saw
what it looked like before... This is what it looks
like right out of camera. And when we add that conversion.
Boom. It just finishes the image. Everything
looks great and it fills from top to bottom on the waveform
and everything's perfect because it was
expecting middle grey to be 41%. So, if we set middle grey
with using PP Off to 41%, that means middle grey's
exposed the same for both these profiles, and to do that,
I had to boost the ISO in order to keep the
f-stop the same. So, we can see sort of where their relevant
ISOs were. For this one, I had to put an ISO 250,
which coincidentally is also 1.66 stops above base.
But, if we look at the shot, we can see that PP Off
has clipped. It's clipped over here in the skin tones, where S-Log3
has not clipped those, even with the aperture MC
shining light directly on it. That light was set to 100%.
Shined right on those skin tones and it didn't clip them, where PP Off obviously,
they're clipped quite badly. Now, this next one is
PP Off with the grey exposed at 20% middle grey,
which is what happens if you leave it at ISO 80 base. So, that's the difference
between these two profiles. This is what 41% middle grey
looks like, and that's base ISO of 640,
but if you use base ISO of PP Off, it looks like this.
It's much darker. But, that's what's required
to stop these from clipping. Remember what I said. That
if the aperture is the same, any two profiles, when set to their base ISO,
will clip or not clip the same? So, if S-Log3 doesn't clip
at it's base ISO, PP Off won't clip at
its base ISO either, which is kind of interesting. I don't
think a lot of people know that. So, as you can see,
the skin tones are not clipping here,
but middle grey is much lower, and that's just the way
that PP Off is, or Movie gamma. It pushes down the shadows
more than S-Log3 does, which is why people think
it has better noise performance. But, if we boost that up
to get the same 41% middle grey, so I had to boost it up in post, which is why you can see
the sort of strange curve I made here.
That's to sort of counteract the Movie gamma to make it seem a lot more like S-Log3. You can
see if I switch back and forth, they look very similar. Well,
now if we take a closer look at the noise performance,
let's look at the noise that we'll get out of--actually,
I think the top corner is the best example here.
Let's take a look at the noise up here. Now, there's not
a lot of it because we're at base ISOs, but I'll
zoom way in so you can see it. So, this is the noise
from PP Off boosted to get
middle grey correctly, and this is
the noise from S-Log3. You can see that they're
very similar. So, what if we do the opposite. What if we
expose normal and then expose S-Log higher by 1.66 stops
and then bring it down? So, what do we got here?
We've got S-Log3. 55% middle grey tip that
I showed you. So, if we hide this stuff, we can see now
when we add the same conversion. See how blown out it is?
That's because that transform was expecting
41%, and we gave it 55, and so it's blown out. So,
earlier on in the chain, we have to bring that exposure
back down so that when we give the transform or the LUT,
the image, we're giving it the 41%, but we've
pulled the noise down with it. And I did that in Resolve
by lowering the offset. So, this offset is at 10.10.
Normally it's at 25 up here. I just brought this down and
I would have just dialed it in until I looked at
the waveform and thought, "Yeah, that looks like
about 41% middle grey." And then now, when we
turn the transform on, we have a completed image,
which again, should be pretty similar. Middle grey
should be where it should be. And these things over here
aren't clipping and everything's good to go. But,
if we compare it to this one, which is PP Off, not only will
these images be very clean, but again,
they should be the same. So, this is PP Off,
which is very clean. Even at 250% zoomed in, I
can hardly see it on my screen. And then let's switch to
the S-Log3 one that was brought back down
and play it. And again,
both look equally clean to me. So, that's two ways.
I'm just gonna recap this because it's kind of weird.
If you expose S-Log neutrally, it might appear
to have some noise to it. But, if you expose PP Off
neutrally as well, then you have to boost the shadows,
the noise is the same. Conversely, if you expose
PP Off or Cine or any other gamma neutrally, and then
expose S-Log3 higher then it, and then bring it down, again
it's similar. Also, when it comes to when should you use
neutral exposure then. The 41%. That's the easiest workflow
and that's what's recommended. Anytime that your
whole scene is like already above the noise floor
because maybe you're out shooting at the beach and
it's bright, most of your scene is probably going to
be above the noise floor. So, you can shoot at 41%
and then just use a simple LUT or transform,
and it's probably fine. And, in a scene like that, the result might be better than
using a different technique because you can save
more highlights and you don't have to
worry so much about noise. But, it might seem counter
intuitive, but the darker that your environment gets,
the brighter, the more you should overexpose
in order to bury that noise. Where I think a lot of people
think if it gets darker, I shouldn't crank up
my exposure because then I'm going to be adding noise.
As long as you're not cranking up your exposure
with ISO, but cranking up your exposure by
letting more light in, you're going
to do a lot better. Unless, of course, again,
it's a dual-native sensor, which this camera is. Despite the fact that Sony
won't officially say it, I am now going officially
on record and saying it is a dual-native sensor
and I have sort of, like, proof of this. Philip Bloom
and I have already talked about this and he
already made a video where he demonstrated this, but
basically, every single gamma in this camera, if you
expose it 4.33 stops above base, it will get cleaner. It
will flip over and get cleaner. And by the way, a correction
on my original video. I said that that switched
at 16,000 for S-Log3 and S-Log2, and it did,
but they've since changed that. It's 12,800 now, which
coincides with that 4.33 stops in every profile.
It was kind of a weird, almost like a bug in
the pre-production version. You could go up to 16,000
and then it would switch, but then you would come back
down a notch to 12,800 and it would still stay clean
and it wouldn't go back to noise
until 10,000. So, I think they kind
of fixed that and said, "It's just 12,800.
It switches at 12,800 now." So that's the new one.
And 12,800 is exactly 4.33 stops above 640,
which is the base ISO. But it's the same thing
with every other profile. Okay, so I figured the
best way to demonstrate this would be to go through
some shots together. So, here is my studio and right now
it's quite well lit. The exposure of most of
the things in the scene are quite high. So, we could
probably expose this neutrally. But, I also want you to
take notice of the grey card that I have sitting right there
on the shelf because we're gonna use that to set
the 41% or the 55% Zebra point off of that card. Okay,
so with the Zebra set to 94%, you can see that that panel
is clipping, which means that information
is going to be lost. And, if we go to C1
and set it to 41%, you can see that
the grey card right there has Zebras on it. I wonder if
we can magnify that. Let's try. We can. So, you can magnify
and you can see that the Zebras are there on
the grey card. So, right now, we know that this scene
is set to 41% middle grey. And a scene like this is probably fine
to shoot neutrally on. This would be right around
the limit. If you shoot outside, you can definitely
shoot at 41% middle grey. But, now let's turn some
lights off so that we can see when it's a lot darker in here. So, let's change the exposure so we can get
to that 55% middle grey. So, let's go down here,
and we'll change C1 to 55%. And, if you really
want maximum noise reduction, you can probably bump this up
to 60 if you wanted, but I'm going to stick to 55
for now. I think it's enough. Now, to achieve that exposure,
we can do two things. We can either
increase the ISO, which will increase
the noise floor as we go up until we
hit the dual-native ISO, then the noise floor
will go back down, or we can open up the aperture.
So, let's start with opening up the aperture
and then we'll lift up the ISO and then
we'll compare the two. Okay, so I've actually
increased the ISO just to make the results a little bit
more noticeable on YouTube. So, we're at ISO 3,200
right now, f/5.6. And, we are achieving a 41%
Zebra on that chart right there. So, this is our
neutral exposure for ISO 3,200. Now, I could definitely
open up the aperture and lower the ISO, and that would probably
give me a cleaner result. We can do that right now
to compare. So, I'm going to lower the ISO to base ISO, which is 640, and then I'm going
to open up the aperture until I get 41% Zebras again, there we go,
at about f/2.5. So, now on the screen,
I'll compare this image to the previous image
of 3,200 f/5.6 for you to see
the difference in the noise. But now,
let's turn the lights off and so now, I'm going to
have to open up the aperture until we hit that
41% middle grey which is here at f/2.8. So, that's what that looks like. But now,
let's try overexposing because this scene
is quite dark. So, I'm gonna change
my Zebras to 55%, and then now I'm gonna
have to open up even more to about here, f/1.8. And that's showing,
it's actually showing +1.7. Here, let me show you
on the--I'll record with my phone again. So,
you can see that we have Zebras on that middle grey card
and we're hitting about 1.7 on the meter. We're at ISO 3,200
and f/1.8. So, this is overexposed
and the Zebras are set to 55%, plus or minus one. So,
we'll see how this compares to the neutral exposure of S-Log3
when the lights were on. Now, let's switch to a different
profile, PP Off, to compare the noise to see if S-Log
truly does have more noise. Let's do that now. Okay,
now we're looking at a shot. This is PP Off and
the meter is set to neutral, so it says zero on the meter.
This is correct exposure for Movie gamma. We'll see
how the noise from this compares to the noise
from the shot that we just took. Okay,
now we're back to S-Log3 and I want to show you
an example of when you can achieve
the exposure with ISO, and it's when
you switch over to the other dual-native circuit. So,
I'm going to move the ISO up and I'm going to do it until
the grey card hits 55% again. And, at 12,800,
it's gonna get so much cleaner. So, let's boost the ISO to
10,000 first, which is the worst possible ISO on this camera.
10,000 ISO is the worst and then it gets much cleaner.
And for that, I'm gonna have to open up one third
of a stop on the iris in order to hit that 55%, or as
you can see on the meter there, plus 1.7 stops. And,
this is going to be overexposed to hit the correct target,
but I'm doing it with ISO and the image should
be much noisier than the one that I showed you earlier.
But now, let's increase the ISO one more third of a stop
to 12,800 and we can stop down a third. And now, we've switched over
to the second native ISO and the image will
be much cleaner. So, this is the only exception to
when raising the ISO doesn't raise the noise floor
and you can get away with this. And again,
every profile has this. Just 4.33 stops
above its base. And here's a fun little
trick to remember where the second native ISO is
for each profile. It's 20 times the base ISO. So, for S-Log2
and 3, the base ISO is 640, and so if you multiply
640 by 20, you get 12,800, which is where
the second native ISO is. And this works
for all the profiles. You just have to round
with a couple of them. The ones that
have the base ISO at 64, well there is no ISO 1280,
so it's obviously ISO 1250. But yeah, just multiply it by 20 if that's easier
for you to remember. Okay, now let's talk about
colour because I don't want to talk about gamma anymore
for a minute. So, for each picture profile, there's
two main settings. There's the colour gamut and then
there's also the gamma. We've been talking
about gamma this whole time. Now, we're going to
talk about the colour gamut. Another thing you should know,
in case you're new to Sony, is that the picture profiles
aren't different. They're all just containers. There's defaults for them
that have different things loaded into
the gamut and the gamma, but you can go into PP6
and make it exactly like PP10 or make all of them
exactly the same if you wanted to.
It's up to you to customize. So, this one is PP Off,
which I already told you is the same thing as
PP Off Creative Style Standard, is the same thing as
Movie gamma with Movie Color. And, we're going to go
over here to the vectorscope and we're gonna analyze
the colours on the vectorscope. Now, a perfect vectorscope,
this is how we're going to gauge the accuracy,
would have each one of these sort of colour dots falling in
each of their respective boxes. So, you see how the red dot
is almost in the box and the same with the magenta
but the cyan and the green are a little bit further away? So, ideally, you would have
each one fall into that, and then the skin tones,
which is this blurry sort of beige blob here,
should fall close to this skin tone line.
So, if you look at a vectorscope and it has all those
things happening, you have accurate colour
and that's all I can really comment on
because accuracy is objective and we have
a scope to analyze it. But, whether or not you like
a colour or not is subjective. So, if I say that
a colour is bad, it doesn't mean you can't use it
or that you can't like it. All that I can really tell you
is which colour gamut will be the easiest
to give you accurate colour. So, let's do that. So... good thing is that
the Creative Style Standard, or Movie Color,
is actually pretty good. Like, this result here,
I know it's not perfect, but it gives
a pretty good result. And you can see me up here.
Maybe if we just expand. This is what I look like.
And I think, I think it's
a pretty good result. So, I'm happy with
the Movie Color. Now, this next one
is PP Off neutral. Now, you cannot
achieve this look by using Movie gamma PP1. You have to put in PP Off
because you can only change the Creative Styles when you're
not using a picture profile, which is unfortunate
because Creative Style Neutral is probably my favourite
straight out of camera colour for accuracy.
You can see in the vectorscope, it's pretty darn good
and I think that the image looks great. I think it looks fantastic,
actually. This is Cinema Color. Cinema Color
is not accurate at all. You can see in the vectorscope,
it's all over the map. I look, I don't know,
blue and pink something. It's not good. Let's go to Pro. Pro's a little bit better
but it's not that much better. The vectorscope
still looks pretty rough. I look kind of magenta
and again, a little too cool which is strange because
the white balance was all dialed in
for all of these shots. So, we're really just seeing
what the colour is doing. Next up, we have ITU709 Matrix. This is one that I would put
in the "decent" category. The previous two,
Cinema and Pro, they're in the "bad" category. ITU709 Matrix is decent, but
it does require some tweaking. But, it's okay. Then, we've got S-Gamut.
Now for these, I'm using the Color Space Transform
built into Resolve, because if I turn it off,
then you can see this is not going to be
a useful thing to compare. And because this is the way
I recommend doing it. It's the easiest thing
to use a transform, then you can evaluate
the colour. Now, I've found that
the S-Gamut transform isn't as good as
the S-Gamut3.Cine one, and again I think
that depends on how well something's used,
how well it's documented. You know, how refined
it's been. It's okay. S-Gamut's pretty good,
but I'd put it in that "decent" category where it
requires some tweaking. But, if we switch over to
S-Log3 with S-Gamut3.Cine, this result is excellent
just using the same transform, but in this case, I'm using
the S-Gamut3.Cine transform. The best result of all,
I've found for S-Gamut3.Cine is to use ACES,
but again that's probably gonna be limited to a Resolve
or otherwise workflow. It's not really gonna work
in Premiere Pro or Final Cut.
So, in that case, use LUTCalc. Anyway, the vectorscope
looks good and this image, I think, looks fantastic.
And that's just using the Resolve
Color Space Transform. Nice and saturated.
Good accurate colour. What else do we got here?
Okay, so now for HLG. This one is HLG with a BT.2020. And again, I had to use a
Color Space Transform for this because I had to convert the
Rec. 2020 Color to Rec. 709. But, that's all I did.
The result is great. We've got really good
accuracy on the vectorscope. Maybe a little bit
on the red/magenta side for the skin.
So, you might wanna pull that in a little bit,
but I think the result is pretty good overall.
I am kind of a pink person. And lastly though,
this is HLG with 709 Color. The vectorscope is back to
Cinema Color/Pro Color mode. And we're back to that
kind of blue-pink, doesn't look good thing. So, the in-camera 709 modes, I don't really like.
So, if I were to shoot HLG, I would use 2020
and then convert it using a transform or a LUT
to bring that to 709 and you'll get
much better results, and your footage will
still be 2020 if you need to do HDR in the future
versus baking in 709 with worse colour
and then needing to tweak it. So, those are my rankings.
The HLG 709, the Cinema Color
and the Pro Color, nope. ITU709 Matrix and S-Gamut,
okay, but require tweaking. Standard Color, Neutral
if you're shooting with PP Off. And S-Log-- or S-Gamut3.Cine
all give really great results. So, the simplest one
I suppose would be to either shoot Standard
or shoot S-Log3 with S-Gamut3.Cine
and throw a transform on. Okay, quick note about Detail,
which is the third, and probably the last, setting
that you need to customize on the picture profiles.
The Log profiles, which I think are PP7 and PP8, have the Detail set
to -7 by default. Where all there other profiles
have it set to zero. And there's a significant
difference in the sharpening of the image between Detail
at zero and Detail at -7. And, I'm going to show you here.
I've got two shots. This one-- they're both S-Log3. I just turned the Detail
from -7 up to zero. So, let's zoom in here.
This is Detail -7. Look at this text, and
then I'll click on Detail zero. You can see it's much
sharper looking. Normally, I'd advise
to turn the Detail down to -7 because I'd rather you just
add this back in post to taste rather than have it
baked in because it could make noise look worse
because it harshens the edges, and it could do
some kind of weird, sort of artifact-y things.
This is the image with no-- the Detail at -7. Look at
the space above the letter "A", and then look at this one.
See how it kind of adds these little
artifact-y blocks of colour and has this kind of weird
sort of shadow above the "A". I'll just go back
and forth a little bit. So, that is what
the sharpness does and the Detail does
and you can't really undo that. With certain shots,
it looks worse and you don't want
to have to blur your image to get rid of it.
You're better off shooting with the low Detail
and then adding a little bit. If you're trying to run
and gun and not have any work to do in post, then yes,
you can set the Detail in, but I would advise
probably -2 or -3. Not anymore than that because once you get to zero
and above that, it gets pretty severe and it
does start to damage the edges of your image. Okay,
let's put this all together and talk about
which profile is best. But how do you decide
what best means? Is it best dynamic range?
In that case, it's easy. It's S-Log3.
Best low light? Well, we kind of
disproved that already. There's no such thing.
Gamma doesn't produce noise and any profile can be
pushed down in post to have a similar noise level if they're
all exposed to the right. A quick note on overexposing
with S-Log, by the way. People often say that
you shouldn't overexpose it because it can cause
problems with skin and so on if you push them too high,
and this is only partly true. There is a limit
to overexposure. And the very last stop
can have issues with saturation
and channel clipping, but the whole point of Log
is to distribute information evenly across all the stops,
which I showed you on the waveform for S-Log3. So, by it's very nature,
it shouldn't lose quality from overexposing,
which is different than a Knee
in the other gammas, which yes,
the Knee is actually compressing the highlights
and reducing the information in the upper register. A proper Log profile
shouldn't do this. At least not across
the majority of the stops. So my advice is that
you're safe to overexpose, as long as you're not
trying to pull maximum detail out of the very edge
of the last stop. That's when
you run into problems. But, there's also diminishing
returns on that anyways. Usually that issue
only occurs in the 2.5-3 stops
overexposure range, but after
2 stops overexposed, you're not gonna see
much more benefit to noise reduction compared
to the 1.66 stops I advised. So, you're likely safe if you follow
my 55% middle grey advice, but just be mindful
of your skies. Sometimes,
you'll have to choose between protecting a bright sky
and reducing noise. Just the way it goes.
So, based on all that, why doesn't everyone
just shoot Log if it's the best profile
all around? Well, a lot of it comes down
to ease of use, or at least a perception
about how easy it is to use. If you're working
with Log the right way, I would argue
it is easier to use than any other profile
on these Sony cameras. It's hard if you try
to correct it manually, but don't do that.
I have a couple videos about this already,
which I'll link below, but the gist is that
you should be using a LUT or a transform
or something like ACES to correct your Log footage,
not doing it manually. Conversely,
most of the seemingly easier colour gamuts require
manual tweaking to dial in accurate colour and the
gammas that have sufficient contrast straight into
camera require manual adjustment of the super whites to
improve the dynamic range. And manual adjustment,
even with non-Log images, when you don't have
a lot of experience, is where things can get ugly,
which is why LUTs and transforms for Log are actually easier
and produce better results. Pretty much every profile
requires some form of contrast
or saturation adjustment, so there really is
no easy profile. So, if you're gonna be doing
a little bit of work in post, what could be easier
than just plopping on a LUT or a transform? And if
you're using DaVinci Resolve, this is as simple
as using a CST node to change your input gamut
and gamma to Rec. 709. But, if you're using
Premiere or Final Cut, you can just use
a LUT for this and you can use LUTCalc to make
your own LUT for free. Again,
I have a whole video on this. This process
makes S-Log and HLG quite easy to work with
because you just convert them and then make basic contrast and
saturation adjustments to taste. And yes, you should be
converting HLG as well because you'll get
best results by transforming the 2020 Color to 709 rather than just using
the in-camera 709 mode, which is very inaccurate. To make your life easier though,
I'll create and upload some basic conversion
LUTs for you. Look for them in the description.
Usually, LUTs and transforms are designed for
neutral exposure though, so if you're overexposing
to reduce noise, you'll need to lower your
exposure in post first, then apply the LUT, then do your contrast
adjustments after that. You can put the LUT on
so that you can see how overexposed it is, but
just make sure that the exposure correction step is happening
earlier in the processing chain in the editor of your choice.
I demonstrated this with the offset node, lowering
that earlier in the chain than the conversion node
here in Resolve for that one image.
So, that's my advice. I recommend S-Log3
because it gives you the most dynamic range
and there's already a vast collection of LUTs and
transforms out there for it because it's such
a well-documented profile. And if you expose correctly,
it's the best image you can get out of the a7S III. But, I know that many of you
also want to know what the best
run and gun profile is or the best for streaming,
et cetera. For that,
we should look at two things. What gamma is
the most broadcast ready and what colour mode
is the most finished and accurate to pair it with? For that, there's only
two answers: Cine2 and HLG. However, I know that
some of you are still having issues with HLG workflows and the workflow changes
depending on the NLE, and I already complained
about the 709 version of HLG on this camera, so I'd say
the simplest answer is Cine2. It clips at 100, so there's no super whites
to worry about in post. It exposes naturally
and you get the "what you see
is what you get" effect. For colour, the best straight
out of camera mode colour mode is probably Movie,
as we already showed, which is essentially the same as using Creative
Style Standard when the picture profiles
are turned off. Personally,
I prefer Creative Style Neutral and I wish
I could use that with Cine2, but it's not possible
to do that. The reason why I'd use Neutral is because Cine2 requires
a bit of additional contrast, in my opinion, and Neutral
requires a bit of saturation, so they go well together
because when using Cine2 with Movie,
when you add contrast, you'll probably want to reduce
the saturation a little too because Movie Color
can be pretty intense, where with Neutral Color, it boosts them both evenly
and they probably look great. But again, there's no profile
that's perfect right out the gate.
But Cine2 with Movie Color is probably the closest
you're going to get, and if you put
the Detail at -2 or -3, you'll have a solid image
straight out of camera. But, if you find yourself
tweaking that image a lot in post,
you'll probably be better off just shooting in S-Log3
with S-Gamut3.Cine and using
a LUT or transform. Alright.
That's enough for now. Every one of the topics that
we covered today could probably
have several separate videos dedicated to them,
and I know that every answer I give
just leads to more questions. But, I'm just hoping that this
video helps you feel more comfortable
using your Sony a7S III or any camera for that matter,
and that maybe you'll be able to squeeze a little more
quality out of your images and save yourself some time
while you're at it. But that's gonna be it for me.
I hope you found this video entertaining,
or at least helpful. And if you did, make sure
you leave it the old thumbs up and consider subscribing
if you haven't already. But if you did not find this
video helpful or entertaining, try setting
the playback speed to 75%. Alright... I'm done.
Seriously one of the best YouTubers ever.
SO informative! I've seen so many Youtubers claiming that HLG3 is "best for low light" or that SLOG-3 has a "ton of grain in low light". Glad Gerald set the bar straight.
The only thing is you can’t get as low of an exposure value as you can with other PP’a because you need to overexposed Slog3 by + 1.7 EV as Gerald Says